The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
“J a m e s Mcbride is the bestselling author of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the 2023 Book of the Year Winner. Mcbride is also the author of: Deacon King Kong, The Good Lord Bird, The Color of Water, Song Yet Sung, Miracle at St. Anna, Five-carat Soul, and Kill ‘Em and Leave. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, Mcbride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University” (Barnes and Noble). He currently resides in Lambertville, N.J., just across the Delaware River from bucolic New Hope, Pennsylvania, and only about an hour and a quarter from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the less-thanbucolic setting for The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.
This story is an uplifting tale of kindness, community and resourcefulness. Although the novel opens in 1972 with the discovery of a skeleton in a Pottstown well, the bulk of the action is set in the 1920s and 30s. The mysterious skeleton is accompanied by a mezuzah, a small scroll inscribed with a text from Deuteronomy and the name Shaddai, which is typically posted on Jewish homes. A smaller version is often worn inside a gold locket as a necklace, as in this case. Also accompanying the skeleton: a redcoat-style vintage jacket. This mystery is pivotal to the plot, but we don’t get the answer to the puzzle until the final pages of the epilogue.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
follows a group of Jewish immigrants and African Americans who live together harmoniously on Chicken
Hill in the early part of the 20th century in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The principal characters are Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew, and Chona, his beautiful Jewish-american wife. She is an avid reader, a brave young woman who has no fear of speaking out against injustice, despite being handicapped from a bout of polio earlier in life. Chona is close friends with many of the Black residents of Chicken Hill, in particular her former schoolmate and neighbour Bernice. Moshe runs the fitfully successful All-american Dance Hall Theater, while Chona looks after the Heaven and Earth grocery store, always offering credit to those in need.
After 12 years of marriage, Chona develops a mysterious illness. She refuses to be treated by the execrable Doc Roberts, who marches with the Ku Klux Klan. Instead, she helps Moshe’s Black handyman Nate Timblin and his wife, Addie, protect a 12-year-old orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing (and his mother) in an explosion caused by a kitchen stove. After Dodo is incarcerated in Pennhurst, an abusive mental institution, the community unites in a bid to free him.
James Mcbride, as well as being an accomplished musician and award-winning writer, has deep roots in this time period and milieu—his father was African American, his mother a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who converted to Christianity and raised 10 children. With this deeply moving and often surprising book, Mcbride pays homage to his Jewish grandmother whom he never met. This woman did not have a particularly happy life, but one of Mcbride’s goals is to ensure she will be remembered as loved, like the character Chona, on whom she is based.
The cast of characters is large, but not so large that the reader loses track of who’s who. In addition to Moshe and Chona, there is Moshe’s cousin Isaac, also in the music hall business; Nate, a powerful and compassionate Black man who, along with his wife Addie, plays a large part in the lives and ultimate destiny of Moshe and Chona, among others; Dodo, the orphaned and deaf Black teen who is the pivotal figure in the second part of the book; Paper, the beautiful, loquacious and clever young laundress who is instrumental in putting together their daring and dangerous rescue effort under extraordinarily difficult circumstances; Monkey Pants, a young man with crippling cerebral palsy who has been misplaced in the odious Pennhurst mental hospital; Doc Roberts, a Ku Klux Klan supporter who is responsible for none of the good that befalls the Black populace and plenty of the bad; Malachi, the handsome and talented young Hasidic Jewish baker who befriends Moshe and helps to heal Chona when she becomes deathly ill; and finally, jook joint owner Fatty and his pal Big Soap.
In addition to constructing and elaborating the plot of this engrossing novel, Mcbride embeds much of the text with observations on the lives, history and philosophy of the area’s Jewish and Black population. Pennsylvania is depicted as home to Quakers, Mormons and Presbyterians. He provides especially vivid insights into the Jews, who emigrated and settled in the area, “who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ?...[the Jews’] job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.” He is equally eloquent when describing the living conditions of the Black folks in the area. Cruelty and compassion are both integral to their lives.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is available at both the Lennoxville Library and the Haskell Free Library in Stanstead. Note: In case you can’t tell, I recommend it highly.